Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Please DO clear your settings on this release otherwise you will most likely end up with previous glow settings which will cause an extreme neon world with the new shader updates

NOTE:Please let me also know if stability increased or decreased , aswell as overall performance increases , this Release has been compiled with OpenMP and im not sure if it works or hurts the Viewer in any way

Take the red pill , get a blue one!

User Interface:
The default Login Page has been set to Experimental from now on , that means from now on the background video is default and can be disabled in preferences - viewer - ui , if you havnt seen it you can either check out the last post in which i embedded it OR you can see it yourself in the login screen :)

Gestures can now be set to nearly all alphabetical letters and number keys which is a great way to use HUDs easier!

The Inventory Inbox panel has got some of my modding love , its translated to german aswell!

Same goes for the Outbox which has been modded and translated aswell AND i fixed the language specific initialisation error , you should now be able to initialize & use the merchant outbox in any language on windows and linux if the servers or your connection doesnt cut it before

NOTE: those 2 snaps have been made with German UI which clearly shows that outbox should be functional in other languages now!

Inbox & Outbox checkbox options have been taken out of the Viewer prefs as Inbox will occour automatically and Outbox is an extra floater

All bad or problem causing video options have been tagged with an (!) behind their label to show that carefullness would be good here

Also some more tooltips explaining some more graphical options have been added in this release

Something that has been a bug since a very looooong time and as far as i know no other Viewer hasnt fixed (probably not even noticed) that IM Session Titles and IM History Titles can only show both Display and Username or just the Username , i finally fixed it (headaches @.@) depending on your settings you will now be able to have Usernames , Displaynames or Displaynames (user.names) in both titles!

You can now also finally disable attached particles and lights (facelights etc) via Graphics panel in Deferred Rendering YAY!

Movement:
This is going to hurt for you i know and thats the reason i do a tutorial about it how to revert it if you want, from now on (until i change it again or make it switchable via UI) you will be able to walk left with A and right with D instead of just rotating like it is (still) with the arrow keys , no need to hold Shift anymore , instead Shift will now change the controls back and make you rotate with A and D as long as you hold Shift.

If you want to revert that behavior , simply go into the Nirans Viewer unpack folder which should normally something like:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Nirans Viewer
or
C:\Program Files\Nirans Viewer
if you are on a 32bit OS
from there go into the folder called app_settings and open the file keys.xml with notepad or any other text editing program you wish , now find those 2

binding key="A" mask="NONE" command="slide_left"
binding key="D" mask="NONE" command="slide_right"
in "third_person" section and change the commands to rotate , it should then look like:

binding key="A" mask="SHIFT" command="slide_left"
binding key="D" mask="SHIFT" command="slide_right"
which will turn A and D back to turn left/right and Shift + A/D back to walk left/right like it was before
please tell me what you think about this change , its even hard for me to get used to it but im making progress , so i might revert it back if its a step to far over the edge

Rendering:
The MOST IMPORTANT thing as first , SHADOWS ON ALPHAS! again...yay , i merged back n forth and fixed the alpha shadow issue , now we can haz shadows back on alphas! - lots of alphas looked HORRIBLE in dark sky presets in shadows because they were like fullbright....

I changed the glow and depth of field default settings to 1. prevent the newest changes from making the world glow like a neon world and 2. have a little bit of athmosperic look through a bit stronger and sooner starting depth of field which should slightly but softly blur out objects on distance!

Bugfixes:
As usual some tiny bugfixes like a not correct recognized ATI card , some ATI shader compilation failures , object discriptions which couldnt be deleted and some fixes for some memory leaks when selecting certain stuff =D

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Clear your cache and your settings if you are crashing on login , please dont forget that! im also very sorry about recommending a clear cache/settings every update...but yea settings and defaults change a lot so you have to do that sadly :( thats the dark side of an experimental viewer that does everything different

Yup , i updated a bit =D

heres what i did

User Interface:
When i changed the people panel to its whole new layout i totally forgot about the group panels... im sorry about that , i´ve redesigned them all completly aswell now , see it yourself!

a little fix also comes to the remove contact button which never really worked , it should work now and remove a selected contact in your contact list (its the trash icon)

there were also a button in the toolbars called How To (who the fuck needs it?) which i disabled aswell , it only took space and served no purpose , this is not a "beginner" viewer , this is actually an advanced machinima Viewer which also does a lot of stuff completly different now , a lot of stuff explained in How To would be obselete anyway...

Rendering:

mostly nothing special ...except... Blinn Phong specular lighting! (coding done by Geenz Spad of Exodus Viewer)...its hard to explain... its a faster and better way to calculate the specular lighting , in other words the sun and light bumpmap and reflections on water and shiny stuff... =D later i will also add the coresponding options to control that

i also tweaked the default sky preset again to bring the nice color faded clouds more to front (clouds were way too big resulting in sometimes just a extremly cloudy sky and therefor just grey sky which didnt look so awesome) , while we are at clouds , i replaced the 256x256 cloud texture which was the default for a long time with a selfmade 2048 x 2048 , the difference shouldnt be too noticable , but direct comparison shows a bit higher resolution clouds =D and i didnt notice FPS loss , so yea... =D i will include an option later to switch between low and high res cloud texture (if i manage to do that)

oh and... yea im sorry for the Animated Trees while merging up some LL stuff i accidentally merged the outtake of Animated Trees, i disabled the Animate Trees option in Preferences - Graphics for now , im not sure if i really should bring them back again , lemme know if i should

Bugfixes:
again mostly some tiny fixes , like some crashfixes (no one ever encounters.... because we all got other problems...but hey...fixed is fixed), Buy button didnt work in Object profiles , open history button didnt work sometimes (it did?) , IM Container (tabbed IMs) now shouldnt lose focus if you close an IM session, "Multiple" has been restored to the texture picker when you select an object and it has different textures on it and i updated the GPU table with some upcoming new video cards , thanks to Tank Master from Firestorm who did that

someone in the Mesh Volunteer group said , we could have had toes for our avatars if the mesh was updated with higher polys over time , well heres my proof that I HAVE toes already! - and yup that are paws but they STILL HAVE TOES!

Uhm well... i was...tinkering a bit with the cloud texture =D looks good eh?

and...this? again Mesh Volunteer group which said they got problems with upload errors atm , again i proved that i dont have them (atlast not all the time) and yea... 90k vertices , the limit is at 65k NORMALLY =D

Phew this was a lot of work... i had to merge up 5 pages of changes each with 30 commits + MAINT/SH fixes another half page... this is actually the first time again i go into detail as promised so i will have to come up with all the stuff that has been changed since the last time i explained it aswell...

see 1.30 as a new major release (it feels like a complete overhaul to me @.@)

User Interface:
Ok , lets start with the Progressscreen which got some upgrades (no laz0r turrets yet sorry), first you might noticed in 1.27 already the progressbar has a % display , second all tips are now localizable and more are now way easier to add

that also goes for the login screen which is now localized weee!

The tools floater has still been more tweaked and some translations of it have been changed to match the new layout , theres also a way to turn it back to normal , but more on that later

Normal menu- and dropdown menu backgrounds have been changed a bit in their transparency to make them better readable especially in graphics panel where they overlap other widgets , right click menus have been changed in color and transparency to match those other menus

Bumpmap resolution dropdown has been fixed as it controlled the overall quality :O omg silly me , that caused a lot of problems...

The mesh upload floater has been redone completly as it was way too big and annoyed me a bit , see the pic for a comparison of the old (bottom) and new (top) one

Viewer tab in Preference has undergone some little changes and tweaks aswell and will in future be completely moved somwhere else or atlast will be redone completly , a few of those changes are the ability to hide the "land" and "home" buttons at the topbar which will reveal even more space now

ever seen such an empty Nav/Status/Favbar? (Viewer 1 NOT COUNTED)

The main menu or game menu as i called it will be redone completly in future aswell , for now it will be disabled because its in early WIP again but i can show you whats going on in my mind

Media rolloff min and max sliders have been fixed in soundpanel and no one ever noticed they were broken...

People floater has been completely redone from scratch it followed tools floater´s layout by just falling over (poor people panel and tools floater , i hope you havnt got injured) , it can now show both "Online" and "All" people at the same time, and i readded the find friends floater which makes finding people easier , instead of searching them via normal Second Life Search, i´ve also put a lot of work to make it PERFECT this time , meaning that it must be correct EVERY pixel , if you take a look at the panel closely and switch between the tabs you will notice the bottombar and the lists are all exactly the same long and on the exact same position , not like the old floater which was a total mess....horrible if you are having perfectionism attacks on some things... as everything new you will need some time to get used to it ....but for those that simply cannot...like with the tools floater......theres a way to get it back to the old style...(more lateeeeer)

And now the BOMB
You....will....be....able....to.....customize....every....color....and...transparency....of... EACH COMMON FLOATER :O dadadaaaaaam , seriously this is no joke! you can even change the color of some widgets (more will follow later on) , the widgets will update as soon as you change the colors , the floaters need a relog, but imagine what you could do! Rainbow Viewer....why was Rainbow Viewer called Rainbow Viewer if it wasnt rainbow colored? this is no joke seriously! try it out it works!

and will give you some new toys to play with =D it also adds to my customization fanatism, i like to be able to customize nearly everything =D i also like huuuuuuge character editors in games

Theres also now the ability to change the toolbar buttons to 3! new styles , the already known 2 ones -> small icons and text only , but i brought you also the S19 mode which will make those buttons look like back in Kirstens S19 which looks way cool and works way better than in any of my mods before or at the times of S19 , remember they are customizable so you can drag them around , reorder them and even add new or delete a few of them! S19 couldnt do that!

Shining:
Well shining is all my Viewer is about, but sadly there isnt much to talk about here atm , there were only a few maintainance fixes and some shining fixes , but most interessting should be a final VAO pink texture fix , aswell as a better texture compression feature and Runatai Lindens tries to get VRAM usage lower , and gratz he really did! try it , for all those who dont have video card with much VRAM try texture compression it can be found in advanced graphics in the texture tab

EDIT: i just added the recently pushed updates including Visual Auto Hide feature (Sculpt Crash Protection) , you will find it in advanced graphics in the performance tab below visual auto-muting controls

Translation:
This is probably the most boring part in all my changes as it is mainly aimed at german and sometimes also french people , i did invest a lot of time translating so many aspects of my interface that have been lost over time....because of all those changes....heres a list of what i translated into german recently
Sound Panel (Preferences)
Privacy Panel (Preferences)
Spellchecker Panel (Preferences)
Setup Panel (Preferences)
Advanced Panel (Preferences)
Login Panel
Loadingscreen
several dropdown and right click menus
all Preferences Tabs itself
and several other little changes including fixes for text truncation etc

SLKinect2:
Has been removed due to linux compiling issues , im not sure if it will ever come back , but i hope it will, if you really want to test it try out an older version with SLKinect2 support, we hope for the best so it might compile on Mac and Linux in future updates aswell

Viewer Feeling:
The overall feeling has been changed extremly in the past few updates , with new updates you may have noticed that the Viewer went more and more into a Shooter/Action RPG feeling , which is good , as it is completly new to SL, it makes SL feel ...direct , less lagier , it changes the perspective you in which you encounter and experience the world of SL and its content and thats something really cool , i mean you definetly noticed that stuff you already know feels completly different now , it might even look different than you´ve encountered it at first and thats something that makes SL really special , there are so many ways to experience SL and theres still so much more to explore! but to come back to the topic , the default Camera Angle has been changed from 1.04 to 1.11 also pressing Reset Camera wont reset your camera preset anymore , i never ever pressed ESC (reset cam) because it fucked up my camere preset , i always had to add the view button set my shoulder view preset again and then take the button out again...that was annoying , now it wont reset the preset anymore just your camera position behind your avatar ... the default camera preset has also been changed from Default View (behind you) to Shoulder View ... and i know not everyone will like that so you can easily change that to your likings again like a lot of default stuff i change, im trying to force as less as possible on you and i want to give you the option to set everything back to normal if you wish , but keep in mind , this viewer is made to be different NOT to be default meaning you might destroy the whole feeling with reverting changes back to normal. Oh and before i forget it you can now also turn your avatar backwards instead of moonwalking , you can find that option in preferences - advanced - movement , it should be on by default :) (more Action RPG feeling)
Theres one last thing here ...you can hold Shift while in mouselook to divide the sensitivity by 10 for very precise aiming (thanks to Marine Kelley´s RLV Viewer)...

RLVa:
Which brings me to the last big Topic... RLVa , i know for some of you its an really evil thing ...thats simply not right , RLVa is NOT bad , its actually a very good thing ...its just used for what you call "bad" things like BDSM... i´ve written a whole huge Loading screen tip just for RLVa

[#9] This Viewer supports RLVa, its a good way to live out your 'controlling' side , its often used for BDSM , locks , collars and other restraining actions , the reason why it was called Restrained Life but just because its mainly used for BDSM its not bad its API can also be used to create powerfull and really cool Roleplay games or HUD's , it can even be used to create automatic outfit wear and unwear scripts! so dont hesitiate to try it out! if you dont like it you can always disable it in preferences in its own panel there but you will need a relog.

but yea RLVa has gotten some updates and fixes to get along with the new TPV policity and ensure future functionality
keep in mind , if you dont like it , DISABLE IT! since RLVa was implemented long ago i´ve had it continuesly ON without exception, nothing happened until now , NOTHING , because i dont act like a noob and click "YES ALLOW TO SCREW MY SECOND LIFE" , just think before clicking or accepting something and you will be able to have RLVa on all the time without any problems , btw RLVa is disabled by default just as notice

added find friends floater again (people panel)added turn backwards options and translationadded compress texture feature optionsadded turn backwards while walking backwards featureadded ability to control color and transparency of each common floateradded ability to set toolbars to small icons and text onlyfixed Media Rollof Max and Min not working correctlyreworked F1 Game menureworked People floater completlytweaked german random tip #6tweaked find friends floatertranslated Sound Paneltranslated Privacy Panelmade add() method chainable on Multiple<> paramsCatznip: fixed : group notices received while online don't have a received timestampCatznip: fixed : persistent notifications in the syswell aren't sorted by dateCatznip: fixed : having the syswell floater open results in higher 'Find Widgets' timeEXP-1885 FIXED the crash when receiving multiple inventory offer notifications.EXP-1884 FIX Errors in navigating text when editing Landmarks and picks once a vertical scrollbar is shownEXP-1883 FIX Toolbar button tooltips display off screen for right hand tool bar, bottom tool bar, and tooltips on top bar items show off screenEXP-1880 WIP Update Media affects framerate even when Media is disabled.EXP-1879 FIXED Crash in People floater in mouselook mode.EXP-1874 FIX Unexpected scrollbar in text notificationEXP-1858 FIX Received Items panel heading in incorrect positionEXP-1853 FIX Misspelled value in llbvhloader.cppEXP-1851 FIX Crash when trying to resize the bottom sectionsEXP-1849 FIXED Privacy settings could be set to default when modifying other preferences before login.EXP-1847 FIXED Fixed inability to mute a nearby avatar in Voice Settings if the speakers list is sorted by name.EXP-1846 FIX Text positioning issues in Floaters, Notifications, UI, and toasts with UI size smaller than 1EXP-1845 FIX Media controls cannot be selected or set in Build tools texture tabEXP-1844 FIX Selecting a large number of inventory items can block the viewer for a long time.EXP-1840 FIXED (When two inventory windows are open and "properties" are viewed, one window suddenly moves in front of the other window)EXP-1839 FIXED Fixed treating normal nearby speakers as text-only chat participants EXP-1838 FIXED Enabled detaching items from hands in the avatar detach menu.EXP-1837 FIX parsing notifications.xml during startup can take > 40 seconds (in non-release builds)EXT-1836 FIXED Avoid assigning NULL to an std::string.EXP-1826 WIP Potential fix: prevent dereferencing invalid pointer.EXP-1825 FIX crash in LLSecAPIBasicHandler::_writeProtectedData()EXP-1823 : Don't display the do not show preview message on item we have no preview method for in the first place...EXP-1822 FIXED After deleting an item from inventory and confirming "ok" to delete, focus leaves inventoryEXP-1821 FIXED Don't open group chat for the selected group if user double-clicks on empty space in the group list.EXP-1818 World/Local/Reference editing mode hiddenEXP-1815 FIXED Favorites list in login screen not populated when display names are disabled.EXP-1801 FIXED Fixed the "snapshot to disk" shortcut (Ctrl+`) to respect preferred snapshot format.EXP-1767 FIXED Received Items panel state being persistent between sessions.EXP-1747, EXP-1152 : Fixed visual glitches in computation of visible width in inventory.EXP-1672 FIXED Defensive fix for the crash.EXP-1672 FIXED Various fixes to prevent crashes in notifications.EXP-1546 FIXED received items - purchasing some bodyparts and clothing from a prim marked for sale show wrong inventory iconsEXP-1513 FIX Underscore ( _ ) fails to show in first chat entry in Local ChatEXP-1507 FIX Viewer 3 displays planar texture repeat values in Build floater asdoubleEXP-1181 WIP as a designer I would like to specify default floater positions using realtive coordinatesEXP-1152 : Fix width computation in inventory panel so that the horizontal slider shows up only when really needed.EXP-901 FIXED (Can see "typing" messages from users who are not allowed to IM you)MAINT-771 Add RenderAutoHideSurfaceAreaLimit debug setting for protecting against sculpt based crashers.MAINT-708 Don't compress UI textures. Use GL_NICEST as compression hint to avoid artifacts.MAINT-708 Fix for pink when enabling RenderUseVAOMAINT-290 FIXED ([PUBLIC]Take object (which belongs to another avatar) does not work)MAINT-261 FIXED Display previously retrieved data (until we get the update) if object inspector is invoked for the same object.MAINT-141, MAINT-95, MAINT-62 FIXED Don't delete files using masks starting with "/".

Monday, March 12, 2012

today i was doing my daily search for my own Viewer via Google to find blogs n forums....and i found this....

especiall ...this...

:O what the.... i mean... i didnt do that?! seriously i didnt do anything.... they did that on their own :O i thought i would have to manually tell them @.@ anyway , this means i can brag with beeing "clean" now xD

YAY Niran is clean (i knew that before already...i dont drink or take drugs or smoke or something like that =D)

Monday, March 5, 2012

anyway quick info: TP crash has been fixed and a lot of translation work and some UI overhauls has been done also a new Texture Compression beta feature aswell as the spell checker (not yet functional) has been implemented for now you will find the Texture Compression ONLY in debug , im still testing around with it
the Debug setting is called RenderCompressTextures and needs a restart!

Friday, March 2, 2012

NOTE: Dont wonder if you crash rarely on loading , i just had a crash and i´ve noticed that the viewer crashed because it couldnt find Loading tip 0 or 11... crap...you can either add them on your own if you know how to (skins/darkness/en/panel_progress.xml)